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Letter: Deep wounds festering beneath Standing Rock

Where the sustainability of the delay of drilling and laying pipe under the waters near the Standing Rock Reservation is unknown, let’s make the bigger picture part of the debate.

The early wealth that developed the U.S. economy was built through the stolen and forced labor of slaves, on lands unfairly taken from Native Americans through negotiations designed to confuse, disempower and exploit.

The face-off between corporate profit interests and the “protectors” sits on the shoulders of this history, and we would all be best served to seek to better understand and then account, in some tangible form, for this past abuse.

Variances and all that legal yakety-yak aside, there are deeper national wounds sitting below the surface of Standing Rock.